Part 4

Wild horses gave much trouble to ranchmen in those days. Tame horses are quick to follow wild ones away, but a wild horse never voluntarily forsakes the freedom of the plains for the corn fodder of the corral. The wild stallions are constantly seeking to increase their harem of mares. On the plains they do it through their ability as fighters and their superior generalship over weaker stallions. They resort to extreme violence in adding tame mares to their bands. I have seen a wild stallion gallop up to a herd of domestic horses, select a mare, and then begin maneuvering to drive her away. Sometimes the mare is lying down and refuses to get up. The stallion throws back his ears and breaks for her at full speed. If she does not move he seizes her with his teeth and bites her so violently that she is glad to spring to her feet. Once moving, she is lost, as the stallion keeps close behind, biting and pawing at her until she is driven into his band, when all of them gallop away. In time they drive away many horses, and in the old days ranchmen often united and killed wild stallions as they killed wolves. The stallions are constantly fighting among themselves, but as a rule without great injury to each other. Domestic stallions fight to the death, but the wild ones seem to know when they are worsted and the weaker ones run away. There were usually about as many wild stallions as mares, and as each successful stallion had from six to a dozen mares, there were necessarily a number of stallions who were freebooters on the plains. These were mostly old stallions, grown weak with age, and young ones not old enough to win their fights. I have seen as many as seventy-five such stallions in a band.

It was November when Kimsey and I sat in the Albany Hotel in Denver and divided almost $3,000 as the profits of our season’s work.

“Where to now, Kimsey?” I asked. “I go to San Antonio for the winter; and you?” “To the C. C. Ranch, on the Cimarron,” I replied.

X.

AN EXPEDITION THAT FAILED.

Five men sat about a table in an upper room of the Coates House in Kansas City. The names of several of them I omit, as they will sleep easier. Upon the table was a plate of shining gold nuggets of a value of $1,600. Charley Cole, the owner, was a miner from the northwest.

He had met the party the day before, and offered to show them where the nuggets came from for $2,000, saying his reason for so doing was that he wanted to clean up and go to the Transvaal, then the Mecca of the gold-seeker.

This incident was in June, 188--. Around that table a party was organized, but with the understanding that no money should be paid until the gold was found to our satisfaction, and with the further understanding that if Cole was deceiving us with the idea of leading us into a bandit trap to secure our money, he should be the first man shot.

To this he agreed and the next day the party was increased to six by a young doctor. Ten days later we were in Rawlins, Wyoming, where horses and a general outfit were purchased and the journey to the Wind River country in the Shoshone Indian reservation was begun.

July had come and the plains and valleys were beautiful in billowy green. Cole, always in the lead, headed west of Lander. There was nothing I could see about the man to indicate that he was other than he represented, although several of the party whispered suspicions as, day by day, we penetrated the wild and almost uninhabited country.

We entered the reservation at a point about thirty miles west of Lander, which town we had purposely avoided, not wishing to incite others to a gold hunt.

We broke camp and were riding down a beautiful valley one morning, when we came upon some antelope. I wounded one, and as it was getting away I spurred my horse after the antelope on the run. My horse stumbled into a badger hole, and the next thing I remember distinctly was the awful pain as the doctor of our party was setting my broken ankle.

My horse was also lame, but later in the day I made out to ride him five miles to the camp of some Shoshone Indians.

The pain in my limb was so great I could go no further, and as the Indians were friendly and hospitable, I begged to be left in their camp. A bed was made for me upon the ground in one of the tepees, and after giving me surgical attention, and leaving me such comforts as we carried, the party proceeded, at my request, for I knew it would be weeks before I could travel, and even then I would be a hindrance.

I felt secure from the kindly attention I had received from the Indians, who seemed desirous in many ways of alleviating my sufferings. Knowing that the Indian despises any manifestation of pain, I managed never to utter a groan, or show distress in my face, no matter how excruciating was Nature’s process of healing.

After three or four days an Indian cut away the doctor’s splints and bound my limb in a huge pack of wet clay. From that moment the pain grew less, and as I felt more like talking, the Indians would gather in the tepee and sit about like children. I made pictures to amuse them, taught them the game of mumbledy-peg, and in various ways won their simple affections.

The days had been dragging wearily, when the monotony was broken by an Indian wedding. Bright Eyes, a damsel of no exceeding beauty, was of that age when the consent of her father could be secured for her marriage for a consideration of ponies.

Several young bucks had been staking their ropes for the catch, each hoping he would be the fortunate one in securing her for a partner. Some of them had offered as high as nine ponies. But Wah-ne-a-tah, which means in English, “it is hurting him,” came forward with a dozen ponies and secured the prize. A beef from the Agency had been secured and roasted, as well as other things good to the palate of a hungry Indian. At about 4 o’clock the bride was taken to a tepee set apart from the others, where some twenty squaw attendants dressed her out in a “rig” that for decoration resembled a general or an admiral’s uniform.

Not wishing to get married at this time, she kept her attendants in tears by her lamentations. Some one in Lander had sold her father an old hearse as being just the thing for a family carriage. The top had been taken off, but the plumes remained, and into it she was loaded. The horses were gaily decorated and an Indian walked at the head of each horse. As she took her seat in the carriage, I obtained the first good view of the bride. A description of her dress is impossible, but it was a curious mixture of every color imaginable. She had proceeded but a little way down the valley, when at breakneck speed came a buck and three squaws who were running to the bride. The first squaw to reach the bride was to receive her raiment, the second a pony and the third a blanket. The bride was escorted to a tepee belonging to a relative of the groom. Here she was placed on a blanket and wrapped up until no part of her was visible and then carried to the tepee set apart for the happy couple. Arriving there she was unwrapped in the presence of the guests and her clothing immediately claimed by the squaw who came out best in the race. The bride was re-dressed, the groom summoned and seated on the blanket beside her. They were now married in the eyes of the Indians. Then came a feast, participated in only by the happy couple and the guests departed to the general feast.

Three weeks had passed when one day an officer of the Indian police came to our camp and through him I learned of Cole’s former camp on a tributary of Wind River, and he said the gulches and sands of the stream were plentifully besprinkled with nuggets, that the reason white men were not there in multitudes was they were kept away by the Indian police.

He said that Cole was permitted to stay because he furnished the Indians with whisky. This Cole doubtless made from drugs.

At the end of another week my party returned without Cole. They came hastily and seemed in a hurry to get away. I asked if they found gold. They replied, “Yes, plenty of it, but Cole’s treachery has defeated every plan.” Beyond this they would say nothing.

As I was in no condition to accompany them and was as comfortable as circumstances would permit, they left me in the Indian camp. Here I remained for a month longer, when Red Jacket and Spotted Horse rode with me to Rawlins. Two truer hearts I never expect to find among any race. I had our photographs taken and made them presents, as well as sending a flour sack of candies back to the camp. When our train rolled away they stood on the platform and watched us out of sight.

The mystery of the fate of Cole was cleared some years later when I called on one of the parties in Kansas City. It seems they reached Cole’s cabin in the wilds of the Wind River country and that he showed them fine placer mines, and that after a few days he produced a vile decoction of whisky which he and a younger member of the party drank. A quarrel between the two men, crazed with the drink, ensued, in which Cole was killed.

XI.

ACROSS THE PALM DESERT.

An ancient fight--as ancient as the time dividing the bird from the serpent, a fight thousands of times repeated in the lonely places of the earth each year, but which man seldom sees, was witnessed by Mark Witherspoon and myself on the borders of the Palm Desert in California, where we had come in the search for gold. It was a struggle to the finish between an eagle and a big rattlesnake. Death was the referee, as he is in all the contests waged under nature’s code of fang and claw.

There are two things men may not know, so it is said: “The way of the serpent upon the rock; the eagle soaring in the sky.” Each has a wonderful power which man does not understand--does not understand any more than he does why they always fight when they meet and that they always should and will, so long as there are serpents upon the rocks and eagles soaring in the sky. If there were no eagles, the rattlesnakes would have no enemy in the sky or upon the earth, save man, to fear. The eagle likewise has no fear of anything, unless it be the glistening yellow and brown poisonous creature of the rocks--the rattler.

Thus it lives forever--the death feud of the eagle of the Montezumas and the serpent father of the Moki’s--the rattler.

How it began I did not see. I was standing near the top of a big stony crag that glistened in the bright light looking over the vast opens and great basins of the Palm Desert which we were to cross, when my attention was attracted by the flop of something striking the sands a hundred feet away. I could not see what it was, but a moment later I saw an eagle swoop down and rise slowly, holding within its mailed claws, a snake. The big bird soared up a hundred feet or more and shook the snake loose, which fell twisting and coiling with a distinctly audible “flop”--the noise that first attracted my attention. Again and again the bird swooped, arose with the serpent and dropped it, while Witherspoon drew closer and closer to watch.

Then the eagle--a young one, as we could tell by its size and plumage--struck and failed to rise. Witherspoon was now close enough to see everything that happened.

The young bird had almost exhausted itself in its struggles with the snake, and may, too, have been bitten by it. At any rate, it was upon the sands, its wings slightly spread, as if from the heat--its mouth open. The snake was recovering from its jolting fall, and slowly gathering its coils.

It rested a moment in position, and then struck the eagle, the fangs entering the corner of the bird’s mouth, in the soft tissues at the base of the beak.

The eagle recovered from the shock, stood motionless a few seconds, while the rattler watched as only a rattler can, and spreading out its wings, toppled over.

Then the man--man who hates serpents as the eagle does--put forth his hand, using a power more wonderful than that of either. There was a puff of white smoke in the clear air and the report of a pistol rang among the glistening wind-polished rocks, and the snake was a mangled, bright, still thing that the ants began to gather about.

“It was unjust maybe,” remarked Witherspoon. “The snake had won fairly--he was entitled to go his way, a terror for all the furry little bright things hereabouts.” “But I couldn’t help it.” “Someway that slaying by poison, even if it is done in the open, doesn’t seem fair.” “Then, too, a man hates to see the emblem of his country’s armies and navies, the triumphant eagle of thunderbolts, lying in the sunshine dead, and that by a serpent.”

We had purchased a mustang in San Luis Obispo and loaded him with our stock of flour, bacon, frying pans, blankets, etc., and was resting on the borders of the Palm Desert, which we intended to cross the next morning, to the Mexican dry diggings, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, when the battle between the eagle and rattler furnished the topic of conversation all the afternoon. From San Luis Obispo we had taken the trail that led over the mountains and through the beautiful Santa Margarita Valley. Of all the places I have ever seen, I think this valley came the nearest to being an earthly paradise. It is seven miles in length, five in breadth, and is walled on all sides, except a narrow pass, by the lofty Santa Lucia Mountains. Through the center of the valley flows the headwaters of the Salanis River. Giant live oak trees studded the valley at almost regular intervals, as if they had been planted by the hand of man. The earth was a carpet of green verdure, with splashes of the yellow wild mustard and varied hues of the many different semi-tropical flowers. Two days after passing through this Eden, we began our toilsome march across an arm of the Palm Desert. When we reached the diggings we found a group of motley Mexicans, who good naturedly swarmed about us and showed us a camping place near a spring, but its waters were so impregnated with sulphates of magnesia and sodium, that we found it impossible to use it. We moved our camp about a mile further up the canyon, near the quarters of a sheep herder, where we found good water and were free from the Mexicans. They taught us, however, the art of dry washing the gold from the loose earth of the placer claim which we had staked off. Here, for more than three months, we toiled. When our supplies run short, we sent for more by the man who came once a week to bring provisions and look after his interests on the sheep ranch. I always pitied that sheep herder. He had several hundred to care for, and their continual bleating sounded dismally in the solitude of the mountains, and when he lighted his bivouac fire at night, it always seemed like a signal of distress.

From the red earth we gathered the golden grains, and when the stars came out at night, and the mountains took on their shadowy gloom, we talked of home two thousand miles away, and often wondered at the enigma of creation. Then came a time when by exposure to the damp and dews, and living upon poor food, we both began to fall sick. Medicine was out of the question, and so with our precious packet of gold dust upon our persons, we loaded our mustang with our camp equipments and took up our march toward San Luis Obispo.

It was in the early dawn of the morning when we started across the arm of the Palm Desert. The sun rose like a ball of fire in a cloudless sky and heated the sands until they parched and blistered our faces. By noon our water supply was exhausted, and soon after I threw away the Winchester which I carried, for I could no longer bear the burden. If it has not been found by some weary pilgrim it lies there today with its barrel as bright in that rainless valley as it was when I threw it down.

We walked in silence all that torrid afternoon. The poor mustang crept along, led by Mark, while we, with bloodshot eyes and fevered brains, could but feebly keep in sight the jutting mountain spur where we would find a haven of rest.

Exhausted, I sat down in the scant shade of a desert palm. Its sparse branches rattled in the hot wind like dried sunflower stalks, and then, in my imagination, I stood a few feet away and saw myself lying dead on the sands, with face drawn and withered and dead eyes staring at the skies.

I roused myself from the horrible dream and walked on. It was long after the sun had dipped beyond the mountain crest, and the Palm Desert was shrouded in the gloom of night, that we reached a pool of clear water, fed by a generous spring. We drank of its waters and bathed our fevered brows, and lay down in the warm sands to awake ever and anon in fitful dreams. It seemed I was buried in the stone coffins of Egypt, where I lay for a thousand years in torrid heat, with unquenchable thirst. Whenever I awoke, I drew myself to the edge of the pool, drank deeply of its refreshing waters, and fell asleep again, repeating the same thing perhaps twenty times during the night.

How soon we forget our troubles, and oh, how soon we forget that we have passed through the valley of the shadow, and that a merciful God has watched over our destinies. Within a week after this, when Mark and I came so near perishing on the Palm Desert, we had purchased new summer clothes and were sitting about the best hotel in San Luis Obispo, smoking fine cigars and playing the part of high-toned young gentlemen generally.

XII.

THE LAST STAND OF A DYING RACE.

The battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, occurred December 29, 1890. It was the last stand of a dying race, the last Indian battle fought on the soil of the United States.

Whatever views I may have held at the time, and whatever part I may have taken in the engagement is mitigated by previous experiences and circumstances; but with time there comes a belief that somebody grievously erred.

Nearly every nation in its decline has looked for the coming of a Redeemer to lead them back to the glory and valor of former days. This has been especially true of the Indian races. The few remaining Aztec tribes yet look for the coming of Montezuma, while the Indians in the mountains of Peru believe that Huascar will again appear and re-establish the magnificent empire of which the mailed heels of a conquering Pizarro host clanked the dying knell nearly four centuries ago.

In the autumn of 1890 there appeared in an Indian village in Nevada a man who was strange to them and to the neighboring tribes. He told them a wondrous story. He had come from a far-off land beyond the setting sun, and was sent by the Great Spirit to rescue the redmen from the oppression of the paleface, to restore to them their hunting grounds and to populate the plains once more with the buffalo and the antelope. He taught them a new form of the death dance and made a garment, decorated it with hieroglyphics and blessed it, and said that it would turn the bullets of the white man. They received his tale with great rejoicing and started immediately to carry the tidings to the tribes on the plains to the east. Great enthusiasm among the Indians marked the progress of the march across the country, and when he reached the Rosebud Agency in South Dakota, so exaggerated were the wondrous stories that preceded him, he was fairly worshipped as a deity. Chiefs Red Cloud, Crow Dog and Two Strikes brought him before the Great Council at Pine Ridge Agency, some fifty miles distant from Rosebud.

For more than three months after his arrival thousands of the Sioux warriors kept up the ghost dance almost nightly. The quantities of unbleached domestic that they were purchasing at the agency stores and making up into “ghost shirts,” together with the ammunition they were known to be hoarding convinced the agency authorities at Pine Ridge that an outbreak was imminent. A call was made for United States troops, but before any considerable number arrived hostilities had begun. A cattle herder was killed and a large herd of cattle belonging to the government was driven into the bad-lands. The same night Chief Red Cloud, who had become almost blind in his extreme old age, was taken forcibly from his home near the Pine Ridge agency building and made to lead the hostile attack on the Jesuit Mission some four miles distant. A desultory firing was kept up on the agency for some nights afterward, when a reinforcement of troops arrived and the hostiles withdrew to the natural fortresses of the bad-lands.

Chief American Horse appears to have doubted the divine origin of the Indian Messiah, and held in check some six or seven thousand of his people encamped on a creek near the agency. In the meantime General Miles arrived with a strong force of cavalry and artillery. Batteries were trained on the tepees of the Brule Sioux under American Horse, and they were ordered not to congregate, which order was respected up to the close of the campaign.

Rumors of Indian depredations were of every day occurrence. Settlers were fleeing from their homes and seeking refuge in the villages. So great was the terror in northwestern Nebraska that General John M. Thayer, then governor, ordered out the entire force of the National Guard, numbering about two thousand men, under Brigadier General Leonard W. Colby, to protect the Nebraska frontier.

The main body of hostiles was safely intrenched in the bad-lands and was only awaiting the springtime, when grass would furnish provender for their ponies; when they intended to begin their work of destruction on the white settlements.

Up to this time no Indian had been killed or wounded, although there was some heavy firing done in defense of the mission and the agency. This fact tended to strengthen their belief in the invulnerability of the ghost shirt which, by this time, was worn by all the warriors. So great was their faith in the efficacy of this garment to turn the bullets of their white foe, that Big Foot and a band of about four hundred ventured to leave the stronghold and commit some petty depredations within thirty miles of Pine Ridge.